"And was that when the Spanish lady was here?"
"Yes."
"And what became of her finally?"
"She fled with the nuns to Cuba at the cession of New Orleans."
Trilliums red and white, anemones holding up their shell-pink cups, and in damp spots adder's tongues and delicate Dutchman's breeches, were thick around them as they walked down by the old Chouteau Pond. Primeval forests surrounded it, white-armed sycamores and thickets of crab-apple.
"This is the mill that makes bread for St. Louis. Everybody comes down to Chouteau's mill for flour. It is so small I am not surprised that they call St. Louis 'Pain Court'—'short of bread.' To-morrow the washerwomen will be at the pond, boiling clothes in iron pots and drying them on the hazel bushes."
As they came back in the flush of evening all St. Louis had moved out of doors. The wide galleries were filled with settees and tables and chairs, and the neighbourly Creoles were visiting one another, and greeting the passers-by.
Sometimes the walk led over the hill to the Grand Prairie west of town. The greensward waved in the breezes like a wheatfield in May. Cabanné's wind-mill could be seen in the distance across the prairie near the timber with its great wings fifty and sixty feet long flying in the air like things of life.
Cabanné the Swiss had married Gratiot's daughter.
St. Louis weddings generally took place at Easter, so other brides and grooms were walking there in those May days a hundred years ago. Night and morning, as in Acadia, the rural population still went to and from the fields with their cattle and carts and old-style wheel ploughs.
In November Clark and his bride moved into the René Kiersereau cottage on the Rue Royale. The old French House of René Kiersereau dated back to the beginning of St. Louis. Built of heavy timbers and plastered with rubble and mortar, it bade fair still to withstand
